

“I think where we really need to put all our focus is to try and be at the peak of our tyres more often, and know how to manage them better. So for some reason we seemed to never really get in the right window of the tyre and when we do it's a bit of a surprise to us. “Then for some reason exactly the same thing and it feels really good. The limitations were completely different to qualifying, so today we were more expecting this. “Like, no grip at all, especially from the front.

“The first stint we had the hard, which we expected to be a good tyre, but for some reason it was so bad,” said Leclerc. Team-mate Carlos Sainz also struggled as he slipped from second on the grid to fifth at the chequered flag. However he was only able to rise to 11th place after his SF-23 again performed inconsistently across stints, even when running the same tyre compound.
